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Bayona’s The Orphanage, a haunted house narrative that features, among other things, the unforgettable specter of a little boy in a cloth mask. Over the course of its runtime, The Orphanage packs in loads of other scares, both otherworldly and existential, cementing its place as one of the best horror films of the last 25 years. Horror icon Guillermo del Toro makes an uncredited cameo in the film, playing a doctor. Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House is a masterclass in pure, straightforward haunted house terror, and John Hough’s film adaptation delivers all that and more.
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The 20 best haunted house films of all time, ranked - Entertainment Weekly News
The 20 best haunted house films of all time, ranked.
Posted: Tue, 10 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The next night, Kisha gets out of bed in the middle of the night, stands by the bed for several hours, and begins to dance. Malcolm wakes up and follows Kisha to the kitchen, where he catches her eating uncooked food and drinking old milk. Elisabeth Moss stars in this 2007 haunted house flick from Mary Lambert, the director of Pet Sematary. If you don't know what the "tree scene" is, you'll never get that imagery out of your head after watching The Evil Dead for the first time. It's one of the most appalling and unforgettable scenes to appear in any horror film, ever.
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A Haunted House was released on DVD, Blu-ray, Ultraviolet and digital copy on April 23, 2013. The film is based on Henry James' 1898 horror novella, The Turn of the Screw, and both Truman Capote and William Archibald won the Edgar Allan Poe award for their screenplay. Jack Clayton directed and produced The Innocents, and he later went on to direct Hollywood icon Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby in 1974. The movie cashed in on the found-footage phenomenon that 1999's The Blair Witch Project proved to be a potential gold mine. Paranormal Activity grossed more than $193 million worldwide, and it only cost $15,000 to produce. Steven Spielberg saw the original cut of the film prior to its release in which Katie dies, and convinced Peli to reshoot the more ominous ending where Featherston simply goes missing.
Beetlejuice (
Natalie Wood portrays Lucy's daughter, Anna, when she's a child, and the actress shot to stardom later that same year by appearing in Miracle on 34th Street. The screenplay for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was also adapted by Amanda Duff, and she claimed Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were originally courted to play the lead roles. The Perrons, too, were not just characters, and The Conjuring is based on what happened to them in their Rhode Island home. The Perrons often visited the set while the film was being shot, and Farmiga and Wilson met with the Warrens to further their understanding of the characters they were portraying. The infamous TV scene, with Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), is well-known, but it's nothing compared to what happens to the television in the last shot of the movie.
Films in the following century like The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Old Dark House (1932), and Rebecca (1940) certainly presented creepy, decrepit manors, but their walls were haunted by earthly threats. However, The Uninvited (1944) creates the supernatural template by which horror films like The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), Crimson Peak (2015), and Hereditary (2018) still follow today. The next night, Malcolm notices the paranormal activity and tries to move out of the house and leave Kisha. Since he can't sell his house in the current market, they hire Chip, a psychic, to investigate; Chip immediately falls in love with Malcolm.
The Others also marked the final time Kidman worked with her then-husband, Tom Cruise (executive producer), prior to their divorce. From The Innocents to Paranormal Activity, most of these haunted house movies will have viewers leaving all their lights on at bedtime. Guillermo del Toro is one of horror’s great visual stylists, but even by his standards, Crimson Peak is truly stunning. A classic Gothic romance full of decay, sensuality, and ghosts, it’s a film that feels like stepping into another world, a meditation on certain well-worn tropes that somehow emerges as something entirely new. That’s thanks in part to the trio of stars—Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska—at its core, but the film’s sweeping, chillingly seductive energy is pure del Toro.
Su-mi is also very protective of her younger sister, Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young). This movie is based on real case files from paranormal investigators, who try to assist a family terrorized by some creepy force lurking in their farmhouse. It's hard to have your car break down on the side of the road and not think about The Changeling. John Russell (George C. Scott) watches helplessly as his wife and daughter are cut down by a tow truck in the snow. Russell moves on and buys a house once owned by the family of Senator Carmichael (Melvyn Douglas), but he soon realizes he's not as alone there as he previously felt.
Yes, Ghostwatch is a fascinating cultural artifact within the mockumentary subgenre. Yet it’s also a thoroughly engrossing and genuinely frightening haunted house story, the kind of thing that will have you watching it over and over again, looking for all the hidden specters. The UK’s Broadcasting Standards Council reportedly received more than 20,000 phone calls and thousands of letters—all of them angry—following the initial broadcast.
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The Amityville Horror, a somewhat underrated flick, is based on the real-life Lutz's unsubstantiated claim that the house was actually haunted. The Dutch Colonial-style home still stands in Amityville, but its address has been changed from 112 Ocean Ave. to 108 Ocean in order to throw off curious tourists. Because ghosts and other supernatural beings need a place to rest their weary heads, too.
If you’re looking for the best feature film version, though, look no further than Robert Wise’s psychologically rich, unshakably tense vision from the 1960s. The horror is subtle, but the way Wise’s camera paints with light and shadows will leave you searching every corner for a spirit. Russ Tamblyn, who plays Luke Sannerson—the heir set to inherit Hill House—in the film also appeared in one episode of Netflix's 2018 miniseries, The Haunting of Hill House.
As Kisha arrives, she accidentally kills Malcolm's dog named Shiloh by running him over with her car. On the first night, Malcolm is constantly awoken with Kisha farting loudly that eventually drives him out of the room. The next morning, when Kisha notices her keys on the floor, she tells Malcolm they might have a ghost. To prove to her wrong, Malcolm has security cameras installed by Dan the Security Man and his brother Bobby. Malcolm tries to have sex with the camera on, but Kisha tells him to turn it off. Before they really start, Malcolm turns the camera back on and records everything.
But by the time it’s over, and you realize it was a haunted house film all along, you realized that the ghosts of this film are all the more potent, and all the more horrifying. To this day, A Tale of Two Sisters remains the highest-grossing horror film in its native South Korea. In 2002, the movie made history at the Goya Awards—Spain’s version of the Oscars—where it won a total of eight awards, including Best Film. It’s the first film to earn Spain’s highest film honor in which not one word of Spanish is spoken. Originally released as a supposedly real BBC television special, Ghostwatch is best remembered now for the sheer terror it inspired in viewers on Halloween night in 1992, but it’s so much more than that.
